I don't put much stock in population-wide rankings of "happiness" because there's so many confounding factors--are Utahns and Wisconsonians actually happy, or do they have cultures that place a high value on always acting cheerful? Maybe one causes the other, idk, but anyway don't take this as truth.
(also there is absolutely no way nohow that New Jersey is that happy. they marked themselves happy on the survey out of spite.)
however I still think it's hilarious that there's a general trend for wealthy northern states to be happier
and then there's Massachusetts
(also there is absolutely no way nohow that New Jersey is that happy. they marked themselves happy on the survey out of spite.)
To be honest: I actually believe it.
New Jersey's often the butt of many jokes but the people from Jersey always seem to have this "Yeah it's a bit shit but fuck you, we love it."
There's an argument that, at least on some level, this is the secret to "happiness", at least as defined by these kinds of studies.
There was a followup study I read about once done in Denmark, where the researchers wanted to know why it was that Denmark and other Nordic countries consistently rank so high on these things.
The usual outside takeaway is usually some form of "buying the hype," that it boils down to all that socialised healthcare and income equality etc. And that's certainly part of it I'm sure, there were kinds of stress that were at least ... less extreme, back when I lived in Finland.
There's a line that lives in my mind whose origin I've long since lost, which goes to the effect of "In that time, no one was really very rich, but it was OK, but no one was ever very poor either." Equity has a way of averaging out expectations.
And this it turns out, was a deeper cultural element that explained that "happiness": it wasn't that things were so much "better" in the Nordic countries, it was that things were more or less average, pretty much of the time, and no one really expected or demanded more than that, so no one was really very disappointed in their life either.
In other words: happiness isn't about everything being amazing all the time, it's about everything being basically fine, and learning to be content with that.
Moreover, those expectations are rather enforced by cultural attitudes. There's a Danish concept called the Law of Jante, which in its simplest sentiment is just: You are not to think you're anyone special, or that you're better than us.
There's a kind of cultural anti-ambition to the sentiment which is ... strange to an American, where we're constantly trying to "get ahead" and bombarded with aspirational imagery and ideas of lives not lead. Everyone's very unhappy quite a lot of the time, because so many people spend their lives trying to live up to impossible standards imposed on us by our hyper-capitalist, hyper-consumerist media culture.
But to come back around to Jersey, well ... when I hear the Law of Jante, all I can hear in my head is "what, you think you're better than me?"
